Everything that's brand safe, is not really brand suitable: Chirag Bhatia, Channel Factory

Brand safety, brand suitability, the problem of misaligned content and a whole host of key marketing issues in terms of ad placement came up for discussion in a keynote address by Chirag Bhatia, Managing Director - India, Channel Factory, on the topic ‘Low-cost CPMs and Misaligned Content - A Recipe to Wasted Budget & Brand Depreciation’. He was speaking at the third edition of DATAMATIXX Asia Summit & Awards 2024, which was held yesterday (August 6, 2024) in Mumbai.

At the outset, Chirag Bhatia confessed that it is a very ignored topic and that he is making a very bold claim as well today, but stressed that this is a very important topic.

He noted that in today’s day and age, with about 900 million internet users as well as the power of content creation, which has been given in the hands of individual content creators and not really professional content creators, there is content which is being produced of every shape and size. “This certainly means that there is a very high possibility that when you run your ads, your ads run alongside misaligned content; it then becomes a double-edged sword,” he said.

“Rather than they working for you, they work against you and hence, for marketers today it becomes our responsibility to safeguard our brands from this misalignment,” he stressed.

Adding further, Bhatia said, “As marketers, we are all interested to spend the brand money in the most cost-effective way as possible. However, in this madness, a lot of times we somewhere tend to forget the difference between being cheap and being reasonable.”

He noted how while chasing low-cost CPMs, we often forget its linkage with the misaligned content. “On the one hand, a brand aims to spend all its marketing budget to aid brand metrics, but on the other hand, while doing so the opposite happens. Not only do all the dollars you spend go down the drain, in fact, it ends up working for your competitors,” he pointed out.

Here, Bhatia I asked these questions – Low-cost CPM, but at what cost? At the cost of low quality content association? Or at the cost of brand depreciation?

He cited some case of misaligned content on YouTube, where a finance ad appears next to cartoon content, because kids often use their parents’ phones to watch kids’ content, but it gets registered as content watched by adults since it is their parents’ login IDs. He also mentioned about the curious case of alcohol ads appearing next to spiritual or religious content. “In a recent content strategy analysis done by Channel Factory, what we saw was that for an alcohol brand, a good percentage of impressions were served on spiritual or religious content. In an emotional country like India, isn’t this a perfect recipe for a disaster?” he asked.

He pointed out that there was nothing wrong with the content itself – they did not violate the platform policy, it was not hate speech, or sexually provocative content, or had high bloodshed content. “But still, for this kind of content it’s not very ideal for a lot of brand categories to be associated with,” he maintained, adding, “Hence, everything that is brand safe, is not really brand suitable. Brand safety is an extreme term, but brand suitability is a very relative term. So, in the quest of running after low-cost CPMs, we often tend to forget this point somewhere.”

Citing a study that Channel Factory had done in 2021 along with GroupM, Bhatia said that the study showed that on an average, approximately 28% of the impressions that brands run in their campaign are run on misaligned or unsuitable content.

Speaking about the YouTube ecosystem, he pointed out that it is the largest UGC ecosystem. It is a most unique creator economy, where creators earn money by the platform running ads on it. “So, from a creator mindset perspective, what is my objective on YouTube? My main objective on YouTube is to maximise as much views as possible so that maximum number of ads can run on it and as a creator my revenue becomes as much as possible,” he added.

Speaking about the ease of creating content, Bhatia said that at this point of time anybody can become a creator if they have a video. All one needs to do is put a headline, a description and a few tags, and the video is up there for consumption by anybody and everybody. “That is the reason why there is content which is being uploaded on all shapes and sizes,” he added.

These are edited excerpts. For the complete keynote address, please watch below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDZZZxiahKk